The things we trade away

Yesterday my daughter shared some of her feelings about how abused women are treated by our patriarchal culture. I’m so proud of my daughters when they share, and also terrified. I’m terrified because I know how the response in times I have shared has affected me. Deliberate transparency has been a tool used against me by men who sought to control and fix me. More and more I find that when women are transparent about our anger, men are quick to tell us why we are wrong. Put a Bible in that man’s hand, and he’ll use scripture to punch you too. I’d rather spare my own young women these experiences, but this form of sheltering does them no favors, not in the world we live in today. So, I do my best to let them express themselves and not interfere– with varying degrees of success.

Enter my rage.

When my daughter bared her heart, one of the perpetrators of my abuse chimed in. The emotions sweeping through me were so fast and so fierce they literally took my breath. My hands shook; my face flushed. I immediately felt powerless – powerless to stop his words, powerless to change what was happening, powerless to protect myself or anyone else from the punishment that was sure to follow. This is what surviving trauma feels like, terror often coming out of nowhere.

I wish I could pinpoint the moment I began surrendering my power. Why did I do it? What made it seem like a good idea? Sometimes I blame the money. We made a lot of money in ministry. People may say money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure as hell buys health insurance and groceries and a place to live and college tuitions and so many other things that make happiness easier to come by. For a long time, it bought me the freedom to be home with my ladies as they grew up, which I desperately wanted after staring down my own mortality.

I don’t know when I began trading my power away for these things, I only know that I did. Piece by piece – my control, my desires, my abilities, my identity and eventually even my voice. I gave it away. I signed it away. I did it. I did those things. I was an instrument in my own unmaking.

I feel shame when I talk about this, shame so deep it almost buries me. You know why women who are victims don’t speak up? I do. I know it every day, all the way down to the deepest cracks in my soul. Those cracks will never go away; the only thing I can do is to accept that they are part of my terrain.

What I am slowly learning is the things I may have done wrong, don’t excuse what happened. Just because I willingly surrendered, doesn’t make it right that they were asked of me, or demanded of me as the relationship evolved. Fear and gaslighting aren’t tools of love, they are weapons of power and control and they are wielded by those who feel they are entitled to use them. And, in my case at least, not only entitled but morally mandated to put me in my place by whatever means necessary, a terrible, holy duty.

I’ve internalized a great deal of rage over the last few years. This rage has manifested itself in anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and depression – the list is quite extensive. Sometimes I struggle with anchoring myself in reality. Sometimes my brain feels shrouded in fog. All of these are symptoms of internalized anger because I believed expression would lead to punishment. I believed because it was my lived experience, over and over again.

All of these concepts and constructs played a role in my emotional response to a person with a history of abuse trying to influence my daughter last night. I wanted to shut down, suck in my anger and disappear just like I always have. But then I didn’t.

Six months isn’t enough time to undo all the toxic messages and ideologies I’ve absorbed. I may spend the rest of my lifetime dismantling those things. But it’s apparently enough time for me to decide unaddressed bullshit isn’t something I’m willing to leave lying around any longer.

Instead of taking that anger and stuffing it down, I pushed it out. I pushed back. I called bullshit. It was freaking terrifying and totally civil and all of twenty people saw it. But I don’t care. It felt like fireworks and marching bands and unicorns with wizards on their backs shouting “RIDIKKULUS!!” riding across my soul. I took back my voice. I grabbed on to my power and held tight. I made anger my tool instead of my enemy.

I called bullshit. And I keep calling bullshit to the message that what happened to me was done in love, was a loving act. I reject that toxic “love” and the claim that it even resembles love. For every woman who has ever heard that weepy, “I love you” while she cowers, hoping the next blow won’t fall I say THAT IS NOT LOVE! It’s power and it’s control and it’s ego and it’s fear and it’s small and it’s toxic and seeks to kill, steal and destroy but it sure as hell is not love.

For years and years, I traded away bits of myself, for money, for an image, for religion, for a fragile, hypermasculine god, for comfort, for fear of the unknown, for fear. I rode all the way to the end of the tracks and dropped off the edge.

But I’m still here.
I’m an angry woman. I’m not swallowing it anymore.

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Author: Dana Portwood

I'm a writer, reader, library lover, grower of feminists, leaver of church but friend of Jesus. Inclusive minded, married to my best friend. Sometimes afraid of my own voice, but using it anyway.
View all posts by Dana Portwood